Driverless cars are being tested and developed, which opens the possibility to their widespread use in the future. A driverless car, also known as an autonomous car, self-driving car or robotic car, is a vehicle capable of fulfilling the main transportation capabilities of a traditional car. A driverless car may be enabled to sense, at least in part, its surroundings without human input and to navigate in accordance with traffic regulations and the surrounding environment.
A driverless car may be configured to perform like a taxi without a driver, in that a passenger may provide the car with a destination address, responsive to which the car may plan a route to the destination address and drive itself there, with the passenger inside. The passenger may pay for the ride with a credit card, for example, or the passenger may have a membership in a driverless car sharing arrangement, in which case the passenger may pay a monthly fee, for example.
Customer data may be classified as private, and the movements of a driverless car may disclose the movements of passengers therein. In particular if an individual passenger can be associated with a specific ride, the endpoints of the ride could disclose private information relating to the passenger.
In traditional taxis, a human driver handles the endpoints of the ride, in particular the driver may drive to the destination address without recording the destination address in any digital system. In contrast, since a driverless car may depend on a digital system to implement navigation to the destination address, there is a risk that the digital system, by design or by accident, records the destination addresses. In case the destination addresses are recorded, they may become associated with the passenger, for example via credit card details used to pay for the ride.
Likewise an initial point of the ride may become recorded in a digital system, in case the passenger orders the driverless car to collect himself or herself from the initial point. As the driverless car may plan the route to the destination starting from the initial point, the whereabouts of the passenger also at the start of the journey may become compromised.